


Controlled Chaos

by stephanericher



Category: Kuroko no Basuke | Kuroko's Basketball
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-20
Updated: 2014-12-20
Packaged: 2018-03-02 08:09:07
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,876
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2805578
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stephanericher/pseuds/stephanericher
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is against her better judgment, but then again her better judgment and her actions are not intertwined very often.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Controlled Chaos

Her descent is chaotic, nothing like the controlled spectacle of the shows where the band knows and the tech people know exactly what’s going to happen next but the audience is under the illusion that it’s chaos, but not really because it’s temporary and they’re still safe in their seats or on the floor. It’s not even like playing at shitty clubs had been when they were first starting out, learning to wear boots with traction because otherwise she’d slip on the beer-soaked floorboards and how to make her guitar stand out in a room full of loud noise, how to make the notes pierce the air—that was more like being dropped down in some place where it was possible to know and predict but she hadn’t learned how to read the maps yet. But this, this is free fall, complete with the sick way her stomach churns as her fingers scream and refuse to bend and she’s playing her solos a hair too slow and her bandmates know she knows and she knows they know and she can barely keep up with them sometimes, even when she buys sketchy prescription narcotics from the roadies. It never makes her fingers any quicker.

She’s twenty-six, and this shouldn’t be happening but it is, and even though she can still feel the music and do backing vocals that doesn’t count for shit because she’s there to shred and her body has betrayed her and in the end, no matter how much they like her and know how to work with her it’s not enough. They make her see a doctor who runs tests and purses her lips at Alex and says it’s an unusual case of some degenerative joint thing with an overly-long name, but she’s got the symptoms (even things about her body she hadn’t even really noticed are from this, apparently) and that’s that.

They don’t kick her out, officially; she resigns form “health reasons” and her fans send her get well cards for a few months until the band hires some guitar prodigy out of nowhere and the focus is on him. But still they come by sometimes and bother her because she’s lived in this neighborhood since the band got started and word of mouth travels really fast. She needs to downsize, anyway, without her income from touring—royalties don’t pay shit, even when you’re both performer and songwriter, so she sells the place and moves into a smaller apartment in a different neighborhood and the fans don’t follow. They really don’t care that much in the end, even though they’d been bordering on obsession a few months ago.

She doesn’t cry about it, not often. She can still play to a reasonable extent; it’s going to be a slow descent and she’s already kind of getting her bearings. Sometimes she just shows up at a dingy club in clothes that would have clashed with the band’s image and dances all night. She answers a wanted ad for a standby guitarist at a semi-respectable bar, and since mostly high school and college kids who play places like this one she actually gets to play. They’re never very good but it’s a level she’s still comfortable with, a pace at which she can still switch hand positions, can fit into the sound. She plays mostly rhythm now because rhythm guitarists are, oddly enough, way less reliable to show up than lead guitarists, and she doesn’t really mind—it’s a different kind of challenge than lead, especially on the fly with people she’s just met.

She jams with random people on the underground scene, too, participates in makeshift battles of the bands and overdoes it a lot but doesn’t really care because this is the closest she’ll ever get to living the dream again, and it’s like if she doesn’t ramp it up the dream will outrun her, dive off the horizon and she’ll have to truly let it go and she’s just not ready for that. Not yet, maybe never. Her twenty-seventh birthday passes, and none of her former bandmates even remember to text her. Alex doesn’t really care or feel anything other than a sense of being disaffected; it’s just another thing to note and then forget.

No one seems to recognize her here; if they do they keep quiet about it which is the best she could hope for. No one really does on the street anymore, either. She dresses differently and wears glasses instead of contacts and she’s grown out her hair and she’s not really on people’s minds—they’re not expecting to see her or even thinking about her, and so she fades unnoticed into the background of pedestrians. That, of course, doesn’t last.

She’s waiting at the street corner and some kid is staring at her from out of the corner of his eye. This, in and of itself, is fairly regular—this disease doesn’t make you ugly, after all, especially when you’re a busty blonde in view of a teenage boy. But there’s something different about the way he seems to be scanning her, and she’s looking back (she can’t really help herself). He’s pretty, with a tight bow of a mouth and a mole under the eye that’s looking at her; he inclines his head toward her very slightly and his other eye is hidden behind his hair. And then she sees the recognition; it takes her a split second to remember she’s seen this many times before, and she turns and makes her way down the side street. When she looks back he’s not pursuing, and she slows her pace and resolves to not take that route home for the next few months.

But the next day, she buys groceries and takes a different route home and she sees him anyway. It’s as if he’s waiting for her, as if he knew. She supposes that she should talk to him, let him have his autograph or whatever. Then she mentally scoffs at herself; it’s not like she’s some magical fairy who has to pay by the laws of the land and now he’s caught her he gets his true desire or some shit. And he doesn’t look like he means any harm and they’re in the middle of a fairly crowded street, anyway.

Her eyes lock with his one visible, and he shifts his weight.

“You’re Alexandra Garcia.”

“Yes,” she says, waiting for him to pull out a piece of paper or a CD case or something, and she’s about to speek when he bows his head.

“Please, accept me as your disciple.”

What the fuck. “What the fuck?

“Teach me how to play the guitar. I beg you!”

Stranger things have happened in this area, but people are beginning to stare.

“Look,” Alex says, running a hand through her hair. “You know I had to quit because of my shitty arthritic fingers, right?”

“But you still play. I’ve seen you.”

She squints at him. He can’t be much older than fourteen or fifteen—he’s on the tall side, but still hasn’t grown into himself, and there’s still a little bit of baby fat on his face. He probably doesn’t even shave yet. Then again, he is quite pretty—but the way he talks, all disciples and shit, probably wouldn’t let him in. Or maybe it’s a lucky guess.

“I don’t know who you are,” says Alex. “I’m not going to teach you how to read tabs or anything—”

“I can play,” he says. “I’ll show you—”

“Then why the fuck do you need a teacher?”

“I can’t learn it all on my own. There are things about the way you play that I just can’t figure out on my own, and I want to know about your perspective and—”

She holds up her hand. “Come with me.”

This is against her better judgment, but then again her better judgment and her actions are not intertwined very often. And she could her the desperation in his voice—he seems proud, too proud to ask for help in most cases but something must have happened. Competition, boredom, something that made him fear. Fear of loss is powerful because loss sucks; there’s a reason they say it’s worse than never having in the first place; Alex knows that all too well. And she’s getting way too soft in her old age (much closer to thirty than twenty, holy shit) and this kid reminds her too much of herself, the way she’d wanted and wanted until it had sucked nearly everything from her.

He’s quite good; his technique is nearly flawless but there’s definitely something a little off about him and there are many things he still doesn’t know. She’s never taught anyone before, but she can’t just play forever, can she? And the way he looks at her is the way her fans looked at her, the few she met backstage—not completely, but she did kind of miss that, the power of suddenly being the center of focus. She doesn’t really have it in her to turn him down.

And so it begins; they quarrel at first but she reminds him he’s here to learn and he knuckles under and works hard when he has to. She doesn’t know much about his life outside of this; he doesn’t tell her very much at all—his name is Tatsuya and he’s just starting his first year of high school and he doesn’t have too many friends (he says he used to have more but drops the subject; Alex supposes if she won’t talk much about her life in the big time she can’t expect him to talk about things he doesn’t want to, either). He likes cooking and basketball; she tells him she likes anime and he makes her watch _Buzzer Beater_ and she actually enjoys it. He speaks Japanese, too; his parents are from Akita but Alex’s college-level Japanese is actually better than Tatsuya’s in some regards; he throws in a bunch of random English words—whether he doesn’t actually know the words or doesn’t want to use them for some reason isn’t clear.

Sometimes they go so late he ends up staying the night, falling asleep on the couch with the strings of his guitar denting his cheeks, and she brushes the hair out of his face and covers him with the throw blanket and he doesn’t stir. She doesn’t really want to take his money (she makes more than enough as a standby) and he doesn’t like using his parents’ anyway, so he cooks for her—he’s messy but effective and he cleans the kitchen afterward. Some of his choices are questionable (like pickles in salads) but it always tastes good. She tells him that it’s a good skill to have, and that ladies love a man who cooks but that wasn’t really the right thing to say and something strange flits across his face for a brief second, a momentary compromise of his emotional shield that’s still too hard for her to read.

And then one day he tells her he’s been accepted to this elite music school in Japan for his last two years of high school (dimly she remembers that it’s been almost two years since they met) and he thanks her for everything—she wants to tell him that he’s not quite done yet, but the words stick in the back of her throat and she smiles and ruffles his hair instead, tells him to stay in touch (knowing him he won’t, though).

There’s something about it that’s more than just another stage to conquer, another way of learning music, another set of people to learn from. She can’t ask him what it is, but one way or another she’ll find out eventually. She’s too invested in Tatsuya to not try, anyway.

She takes on more students after he leaves but they’re nothing like him. In a way, it’s a relief (she doesn’t want to replace him and she doesn’t have the space or time for another person quite like him) but it’s also as if she’s missing something. Of course she’d come to enjoy their time together but it’s more than that—more than a student, he was in many ways her closest friend. Not in terms of what they knew about each other, but in terms of trust, in terms of the value of their shared time. And it hurts, but there’s probably something he needs to do over there, and something she needs to do here.

He does keep in touch, a little—she usually has to call or text first but he replies, mentions a big competition they’re having in Tokyo, and she flies out to see it. He’s more sullen and bitter than before, turning away from her and telling her he’s already better, and her fingers are aching in the coolness of late autumn but she could still more than hold her own against him; there are still things that he’s never seen her do. And especially with the monster kind of competition he’s up against, the person he’d referenced when he said he used to have friends among them, a headstrong boy a year younger than Tatsuya who wears a ring around his neck identical to the one she’s never seen Tatsuya without (he says they were once closer than brothers, fingers twitching like he wants to wrap the ring inside them). He wields music like a weapon; it flows through him with a kind of power that Tatsuya will probably never have—this is it, the thing that put that desperation in Tatsuya’s eyes those two years and change ago, even with that talent still rough and unshaped. It’s all fitting together now, sickeningly so.

Tatsuya loses badly, so bad it makes his face blank and dead and his hands shake. He punches another guy from his school who doesn’t really deserve it even if he does take his talent for granted, but he doesn’t really hold it against Tatsuya. And that’s the thing about Tatsuya, that it’s very hard sometimes to hold his faults against him. But even if it wasn’t him, Alex knows too well the feeling of the bottom falling out from under you, the foundations of your dream crumbling to dust when you can do nothing but watch.

He cries, though; his strong shoulders shake and his cheeks are stained with salt and his voice is raspy when he tells her again not to treat him like a child and she supposes that he really isn’t one, not anymore. He still sulks and is altogether too hard on himself and caught in the awful twists and turns of adolescence. But still, she wants him to stay young, to keep these strange thoughts from entering her head—he might be caught up in his own selfishness, but she’s more than a little bit selfish, too.

She goes home after that; there’s not much of a reason to stay. She talks with him less often; her grip gets worse; her students learn and grow. The world moves. Alex sits on the couch late at night, watching the kind of anime Tatsuya doesn’t like and her joints complain at how tightly she grips the ice cream spoon—it’s not quite his brand of melancholy. When they do talk, he seems like he’s doing a bit better but she doesn’t know for certain from just his voice. It’s not like she could do much, anyway; support goes only so far and he’s in this thing alone, almost unreachable to her.

She doesn’t expect to see him show up when he does, an afternoon in early April—the buzzer rings and it’s too early for her next student and the grainy video feed is undeniably him, looking up at the camera with a hint of a smile on his lips and he’s okay and she half-sobs, leaning on the button to let him in. His footsteps are quiet but audible on the stairs, and then he comes into sight—he’s gotten a little bit taller (she only barely reaches his chin now) and he walks differently, easier and not like he’s got some sort of all-consuming purpose. He hugs her with fewer reservations than he’s ever hugged her, and she realizes, studying his face, that he really has grown up. He’s still not really an adult, but he’s comfortable with himself in a way that when they met was completely incompatible with the him that existed.

He’s brought his guitar (of course); they play for a little bit and he’s really not much better from the last time she’d heard him. He’s long since reached his limit, but there’s a better quality to his music and he looks so relaxed now that he’s not hitting his head against that ceiling over and over again. There’s no doubt he’s still trying to cope with it, but it takes time—it’s taken time for her; it’s still taking time.

She pulls him into another hug when they’re sitting on the couch, when he’s about to get up.

“I’m proud of you, Tatsuya,” she whispers.

He stiffens and then hugs her back. “Thank you.”

It’s completely genuine.

**Author's Note:**

> supposedly day 2 of the cheesy tropes challenge...which i'm really giving up on i don't know what this is. only that it's not actually idol/fan.


End file.
